Leonel Nunez wrote:
Just like any other migration do you tests in other machines and do parallel tests every migration needs fixes
Leonel
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
I can second this. I am in the process of migrating 5 research labs from Suse 10.0 to CentOS 5 (for various reasons). The migration has been in testing phase for over 3 months and a lot of bugs have been found and corrected in that time.
A migration from any OS to another is a very tedious and time consuming step. You will need to work on each part of the migration individually. Start with the services that you are most familiar with or that you feel you could learn the quickest.
Setup a machine with CentOS 5 and begin testing that service. When you are confident that said service is operating as it should, shift that service from the production server to your testing server. Let it run there for a bit because chances are you'll find bugs and that will give you a chance to fail the service back over (if necessary) while you correct the issue.
Once you've gotten all the services over to the new box you'll be happy to know you did it the "right way" and that you've incurred the least amount of pain for you, your fellow workers who work with you and your users.
IMHO, you should spend a lot of time testing the Perforce migration, followed by your web services. Migration of any SCM is a potentially complicated operation. I haven't used Perforce before, but be careful.
Secondly, careful testing of your web services is crucial. You'll most likely be upgrading version of Apache, PHP and libraries at the same time which can break things like backward compatibility. Samba depending on it's function within your institution would be a close third, if not a tie for number 2, but that's up to you.
The squid services are probably not all that complicated if they're only using a caching server (forward or reverse).
Of course, with proper software unit testing and a bit of elbow grease I'm sure it will all go over well.
There are various papers on best practices for OS migrations and various other system administrator task on the web just google for migration best practices and you'll find lots.